Hodel said it was clear the search would turn up something as soon as Buster was turned loose.

Elizabeth Short's booking photo in Santa Barbara in 1943 for "Minor Possession". She was 19 and with some military men at a bar. Arrested and sent home to Medford, MA. Elizabeth Short was the Black Dahlia Murder victim. (HAND-IN)

"Buster immediately took off ... and ran to a vent located at the southwest corner of the property where he alerted, indicating he had picked up the scent of human decomposition."

Buster's unique sense of smell led Hodel and Dostie to a vent just outside the home's basement. Hodel said that portion of the Sowden House - designed by Lloyd Wright and built in 1926 - is largely unchanged and looks the same as it did in 1947, the year Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was slain.

On Jan. 15, 1947, Short's bisected body was discovered in a vacant lot near the intersection of 39th Street and Norton Avenue in South Los Angeles.

Newspapers in the region devoted pages and pages of coverage to the slaying.

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Several editors and LAPD officials received taunting notes believed to be from Short's killer.

Hodel believes his father George Hill Hodel, a Los Angeles doctor who grew up in South Pasadena, killed the Dahlia and may have been responsible for several other "lone woman" murders in the 1940s.

Hodel's research, which resulted in the book "Black Dahlia Avenger," convinced several officials - including Manson family co-prosecutor Stephen Kay - that the case had been solved.

George Hodel's October, 1949 booking photo for Incest and Child Molestation, the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia Murder. (HAND-IN)

Additional research led Hodel to files maintained by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. The files indicated his dad was a person of interest in the Dahlia case.

During an interview with producers of the "Ghost Hunters" show, Hodel explained his theory that Short suffered "several hours of extended torture, which included cigarette burns to her back and sexual assault."

"Ghost Hunters" was filmed in conjunction with the anniversary of the gruesome discovery, but when it aired the footage of Buster was left on the cutting room floor.

Dostie made national news in 2008 when he took Buster to the Manson Family's Barker Ranch in Death Valley to hunt for possible grave sites.

Buster hit on five possible locations where human remains might have been located. He's also located the graves - and remains - of American soldiers buried hastily in Belgium battlefields during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.